Short answer: Absolutely!
The Scrum Framework defines three distinct roles: the Product Owner, the Development Team and the Scrum Master. The Scrum Guide does elude Stakeholders but does not mention anything about managers, executives and leaders. This causes a lot of friction between teams and managers as the role is not clear. Scrum dogmatists then profess that there should be no managers, or scrum has no managers.
These managers, however, see that Scrum Teams do not actually take the business interests at heart and only focus on product and delivery and ignore other important business activities.
Where are managers in Scrum and do we need them?
We need management but in the form of strong leaders that have a core responsibility. Remember Scrum is a framework with a strong focus on building complex products. It is not a business modelling framework and hence does not include the management role in the framework. The framework deliberately leaves this role out, thus allowing the business to structure and organize how it sees fit.
The executives are there to define how the business operates and the structures need to sustain the organization. This is a territory that Scrum should not engage.
However, Scrum is highly dependent on the organization’s management to create an environment that fosters. Leaders have critical responsibility in Agile and in Scrum, doing the following:
- Set a strong vision and mission of why agility is important for the organization.
- Remove business-related impediments that prevent agile teams from working optimally
- Define the culture and psychological safety of the organization
- Establish valuable feedback cycles that allow organizations to navigate complex product development
- Help the organization see the control and discipline that is needed to be agile
- Manage the operational and logistical needs of teams
- Actively drive the journey of continuous improvement, self-improvement, adaptability, feedback
- Lead teams to success
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